Ted Bundy: America’s Most Evil Serial Killer

By Al Cimino

On first impressions, Ted Bundy seemed like the perfect all-American boy. He was good-looking, fun and very charming; many women found him irresistible...

But deep inside he was an evil monster who terrorised large areas of America, assaulting and murdering numerous women and adolescent girls. He used his insider knowledge of law enforcement to evade detection, escaping from imprisonment twice before his eventual capture. While he confessed to 30 killings, the real figure was probably much higher and many of the bodies have never been found.

Crime writer and journalist Al Cimino delves into this astonishing and tragic tale, providing a detailed account of Bundy's crimes and the twisted manipulations of his victims. This is the story of a chameleon-like psychopath and necrophile who lured innocent victims to a horrible end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789508536

Al Cimino

Al Cimino is a journalist and author who specialises in history and crime. His books include Great Record Labels, Spree Killers, War in the Pacific, Omaha Beach, Battle of Guadalcanal and Battle of Midway. Al was brought up in New York City and now lives in London.

Book preview

Chapter One

Ted

Women had gone missing before. There had even been murderous attacks. But the police only realized that a serial killer was at large on Sunday 14 July 1974, when two young women disappeared from the picnic area at Lake Sammamish State Park in Washington State on the same day. Others had been approached. There were numerous witnesses and the police even knew the man’s name. It was Ted. Before, the attacks had taken place at night. Now the perpetrator had the nerve to carry out his abductions in broad daylight.

A fun Sunday by the lake turns dark

That Sunday was hot and sunny and the crowd in the park, some 12 miles (19 km) east of Seattle, had swelled to 40,000. A local brewery was holding its annual beer party, complete with music and a keg-throwing contest. Water-skiers were out on the lake. Even the Seattle police were having a picnic there.

Twenty-three-year-old Janice Ott left a note saying ‘I am at Lake Sammamish sunin’ myself’ on the door of her apartment in Issaquah, five miles (8 km) away. Wearing a white blouse knotted at the midriff and a pair of Levi’s cut-offs over her black bikini, she rode her yellow ten-speed bike to the park.

Jerry Snyder, a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent from Seattle, noticed the attractive young blonde spread out a blanket and stripped down to her bikini. He then noticed a young man who had been looking at other young women in the park sit down beside her. The young man had his arm in a sling.

Moments earlier, the same man had approached 22-year-old Janice Graham at the nearby bandstand. She said he was 5 ft 8 in to 5 ft 10 in (173–79 cm), with curly, sandy blond hair, weighed 150–160 lb (68–72 kg) and was 24 or 25 years old. He was wearing white shorts and a white T-shirt with red trim around the neck.

Explaining that he had hurt his arm playing racquetball, he asked her if she could help him unload a sailboat from his car. She agreed and walked with him to the parking lot. They walked up to his metallic brown Volkswagen Beetle, but there was no sign of a boat or a trailer. The sailboat, he said, was at his parents’ house just up the hill. She explained that she could not go with him to fetch it as she was waiting for her husband and her folks.

‘That’s okay,’ said the man with the sling. ‘I should have told you that it was not in the parking lot. Thanks for bothering.’

Ted Bundy’s 1968 VW Beetle in the National Museum of Crime and Punishment. With its cracked windscreen and faded Utah inspection sticker, it takes pride of place in the building’s lobby.

Ten minutes later she saw him walking towards the parking lot once more, this time with a blond girl with a yellow ten-speed bike.

Fifteen-year-old Sylvia Valint and two school friends were sunbathing just a few feet from Janice Ott when the man with the sling had approached her. He introduced himself as ‘Ted’ and asked her whether she could help him with his sailboat. She invited him to sit down. This time he explained that the boat was at his parents’ house in Issaquah. Sylvia described him as ‘smooth talking’.

Housewife Traci Sharpe was also nearby and was suspicious. ‘I didn’t feel his arm was really hurt,’ she said. ‘I do remember he took his arm from the sling and moved it around.’

She did not think that Janice was buying Ted’s line. Nevertheless, Traci saw Janice get up and put on her blouse and shorts. The man agreed to introduce her to his parents and teach her to sail. After he assured her that her bike would fit in his VW Beetle, they left together.

Around the time Janice Ott left the park with Bundy, 19-year-old Denise Naslund was leaving Charlie’s Eastern Tavern in Seattle with her boyfriend Kenny Little and their friends Nancy Battena and Bob Sargent. They picked up some beers and headed for the park. It was about 12.30 pm. On the way they took some Valium.

Jacqueline Plischke arrived in the park around 4 pm. She was wearing cut-off blue jeans and pink bikini top. As she was locking up her bike she noticed a man was watching her. A little later he approached her and asked if she could help him put his sailboat on his car.

Minutes earlier he had asked 16-year-old Sindi Siebenbaum if she could help him launch his sailboat. She declined, explaining that people were waiting for her. Jacqueline also refused, saying she was waiting for someone. Then he approached Patricia Ann Turner, who explained that she wasn’t feeling well – too much sun. The young women he approached said that he spoke with a light accent, perhaps Canadian or British.

Denise Naslund’s party had picnicked on hamburgers and hotdogs. Her boyfriend Kenny had fallen asleep. Around 4.40 pm, she got up to go to the restroom. She did not return. Kenny woke about half an hour later and was immediately alarmed. Denise had left her purse in the trunk of her car and she was not the sort of person who went anywhere without her makeup.

Kenny, Nancy and Bob began searching the park. There was no sign of Denise. They continued searching until the crowds thinned out at around 8.30 pm. Kenny then called the police and was told that a person must be missing for 24 hours before an investigation could start. Besides, a relative must file the report, so Kenny drove to Denise’s mother’s house, and she immediately called the police.

‘I know Denise would never take off and leave her car,’ she told them. ‘She was so happy when I bought it for her. Or leave her purse. She took too much pride in how she looked. I knew something had happened.’

It is thought that Bundy took Denise to where Janice was being kept, tied up but still alive. After repeated sex attacks, first on Ott, then on Naslund, Bundy killed one in front of the other. Two months later, in September 1974, the remains of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund were found with a third unidentified body, dumped in woodland two miles (3 km) east of Lake Sammamish Park. Their killer had returned to have sex with their corpses despite their growing state of putrefaction. Little was left of them when they were found. Their flesh had been eaten by animals. Two of the skulls were missing. Bundy was known to decapitate his victims’ corpses and keep their severed heads for oral sex later.

After the bodies were found, the Issaquah Police Department turned the investigation over to Seattle’s King County Police Department, which was also looking at a series of possibly related attacks, abduction and murders from the previous year. Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington.

On 25 November 1973, 15-year-old Kathy Devine had been hitchhiking from Seattle to Oregon. She was seen getting into a pick-up truck with a male driver. On 6 December her body was found by a couple hired to clean up McKenny Park near Washington State’s capital Olympia, later a haunt of Bundy. Kathy’s body was fully clothed, but found face down with her jeans slit down the back seam from waist to crotch. Bundy liked to rape his victims from behind, either vaginally or anally, while strangling them. The abnormally warm winter meant that Kathy’s body was decomposed and it had been ravaged by animals. However, the pathologist’s tentative conclusion was that she had been throttled or had her throat cut shortly after she had last been seen. It was also thought she had been sodomized. Before his execution Bundy admitted to picking up a hitchhiker in 1973, raping and murdering her, and leaving her body near Olympia, but he couldn’t remember exactly where.

The ‘helpless’ predator targets college students

Next there was the attack on 18-year-old Joni Lenz, who lived in a basement room of a big old house on 8th Avenue near the University of Washington in Seattle. It was accessible from the outside by a side door that was usually kept locked. On the night of 4 January 1974 Joni went to bed as normal. When she did not appear for breakfast the following morning her housemates thought she was having a lie-in. By mid-afternoon she was not responding to their calls so they went down to check on her. They found her unconscious, her face covered with blood. She had been beaten around the head with a metal bar wrenched from the bed frame. When they pulled back the covers, they found that a speculum had been forced into her vagina, causing terrible internal damage.

She survived, after more than a week in a coma. But when she came round she could not remember anything after ten days before the attack. The blow to the head left her brain damaged for the rest of her life. The police believed that a peeping tom had seen her undressing though the basement window, found the door unlocked, made his way to her bedroom and attacked her.

Twenty-one-year-old psychology student Lynda Ann Healy lived just a few blocks away on 12th Avenue. She had an early morning job as the ski report announcer on a local radio station. On 31 January she made dinner for her housemates, before accompanying them to a nearby club named Dante’s. After a couple of pitchers of beer they returned home at around 9.30 pm.

Lynda made an hour-long phone call to her boyfriend, then chatted with a housemate before turning in. She too had a bedroom in the basement, separated by a plywood partition from housemate Karen Skaviem’s room. As Karen descended the basement stairs at about 12.45 am that night, she did not check to see if the outside door was locked. Indeed, the front door on the ground floor was also unlocked as the keys had been lost. Before everyone had gone to bed, Bundy admitted later, he had tried the door. Finding it open, he decided to return later after everyone had gone to sleep.

Karen dozed off at around 1.30 am. At 5.30 am she heard Lynda’s alarm sounding. At 6.30 am the radio station phoned to ask why Lynda had not come in to work. Karen went into Lynda’s room and found the bed made. This was odd. Lynda usually left it unmade because of her early start. But she had not shown up at work that morning and the bike she used to ride there was still in the basement. Nor did she appear in class later.

Housemate Joanne Testa called Lynda’s mother at 4 pm. Her father and brother arrived at 6 pm, as Lynda was supposed to cook dinner for the family that evening. The police were called and patrolmen visited to make enquiries. At 8 pm the phone rang, but there was no one on the line. There were two more calls where the caller remained silent.

When homicide detectives arrived and pulled back the covers on Lynda’s bed, they found bloodstains. Blood had soaked through the sheets into the mattress. Whoever had shed the blood had been seriously injured, but there was not enough blood present to show that the victim had bled to death.

A pillowcase was missing. In the closet detectives found Lynda’s nightdress, which was stiff with dried blood around the collar. The clothes that she had been wearing the previous evening were missing, along with her backpack. The area was searched, but nothing was found. Forensic examination of the crime scene also came up with nothing. The perpetrator had not left so much as a hair, or a drop of blood or semen.

On 4 February someone called 911. A male voice said: ‘Listen carefully. The person who attacked that girl on the 8th last month and the person who took Lynda Healy away were one and the same. He was outside both houses. He was seen.’ When asked who was calling, the man said: ‘No way are you going to get my name,’ and hung up.

Lynda’s current and former boyfriends volunteered to take lie detector tests and passed. With nothing to go on, the police were stymied. All that was clear was that Lynda was dead. A year later her lower jaw was found on Taylor Mountain, near the Washington Cascades, another of Bundy’s dumping grounds. It was identified by dental records.

Nineteen-year-old Donna Manson was a student at Evergreen State College near Olympia in Washington. On the night of 12 March 1974 she planned to attend a jazz concert on campus. She left the dormitory at around 7 pm. Her route would have taken her down a dark pathway. She did not arrive at the concert. No one worried – at first. Donna was a flighty young woman who frequently went missing. The college’s chief security officer and the local police were only informed of her absence six days later. Few, if any, of her clothes were missing and she had even left money behind.

Eighteen-year-old Susan Rancourt went missing from Central Washington State College (now Central Washington University) in Ellensburg on 17 April 1974. Like the other victims, she was pretty, with her long blond hair parted in the middle. At 8 pm she had put clothes into one of her dorm’s washing machines, before attending a meeting in Munson Hall at the southern end of the campus. Her clothes were still in the machine when Susan’s roommate Diana Pitt filed a missing person’s report with the campus police department at 5 pm the following day. Nothing was missing from her room. Her route back to the dorm would have taken her down some darkened pathways and she could not see well. Her glasses and contact lenses had been left behind in her room.

‘I didn’t know him. I didn’t want to get into his car.’

However, the suspected abductor had been seen. At around 10 pm, 21-year-old Kathleen D’Olivo was leaving the Bouillon Library, heading for the parking lot, when she heard the sound of books hitting the ground. She turned around to see that they had been dropped by a man with one arm in a metal brace and the other in a sling. Kathleen picked the books up for him. She thought he was going to the library. Instead he was heading for his car, which was parked in a dark no-parking area under a railway bridge surrounded by tall grass. He said he had been injured in a skiing accident, so she carried his backpack for him.

His car was a brown VW Beetle. She put down his backpack and said goodbye. He then fumbled with his car keys, dropped them and asked her to pick them up for him. She was wary. Instead of bending down to grope for them in the darkness, she suggested they step back. What little light there was glinted off the keys. She grabbed them, dropped them in his hand and made off.

At 10.15 pm, another student named Barbara Blair said she saw a young white female wearing a yellow coat with a man in a parka on Walnut Mall, near the library, which would have been on Susan Rancourt’s route back to her dorm. They were heading in the direction that Kathleen D’Olivo had taken earlier with the man with his arm in a sling.

Twenty-one-year-old Jane Curtis had a similar encounter three days earlier. She had been leaving the library at around 9 pm. Again the mystery man had dropped his books. When she went to his assistance, he explained that he had been injured in a skiing accident. She carried his books to his car, then he handed her the keys to open the door. Wary, she refused to take them. After he opened the door, he asked her to get in and start the car for him.

‘He told me that he was having trouble getting it started and asked me to get in and try the ignition while he did something under the hood,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know him. I didn’t want to get in his car, and I just made some excuse about being in a hurry and I left.

Jane dropped his books and fled. But Susan Rancourt did not flee. Her skull was found on Taylor Mountain. It had suffered blunt force trauma to the back of the head and her jawbone was broken in three places.

Nineteen days after Susan Rancourt went missing, on 6 May 21-year-old Roberta Kathleen ‘Kathy’ Parks disappeared from the Oregon State University campus at Corvallis, over 200 miles (322 km) away. She was studying world religions. Tall and slender, she had her waist-length ash blond hair parted in the middle. She was unhappy because she had recently broken up with her boyfriend and her father had just had a heart attack.

At around 11 pm, after an exercise session in the dorm lounge of her hall of residence, Sackett Hall, she set out for the student union building to get refreshments. She did not arrive. Because of her despondent state, the nearby Willamette River was dragged, in case she had committed suicide. As in previous cases, she had left behind her clothes, cosmetics and her bike.

After a fruitless week-long search her picture went up alongside those of the other missing women and girls on the wall of every law enforcement agency in the Pacific Northwest. Captain Herb Swindler, Commander of Seattle Police Department’s Crimes